A landmark agreement for Ukraine to hand over half of its future oil, gas and mineral wealth to the U.S. may be thawing a cold war within the Republican Party.
For more than a year, Republicans have been at odds over the war-torn country, with Trump-aligned lawmakers skeptical of continued involvement and national security hawks intent on countering Russia’s continued invasion. But several Republicans in Congress told TIME Thursday that the deal gives both factions what they need: a path to continued support that could be sold to voters as either a business arrangement or a moral obligation—or both.
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“Yesterday was a very bad day for the dictator and war criminal, Vladimir Putin,” Senator Roger Wicker, a Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, tells TIME. “The door is now open for more aid. It’s a game changer.”
The deal, completed on Wednesday after months of negotiations, will give the U.S. a 50% stake in all new oil, gas and mineral projects and infrastructure inside Ukraine and will be used to fund Ukrainian purchases of U.S. weapons systems. The terms, which still have to be ratified by Ukraine’s parliament, seem to have dissolved weeks of tension between the inner circles of President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky after Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance dressed down Zelensky in a heated Oval Office exchange.
Read more: Zelensky on Trump, Putin, and the Endgame in Ukraine
The U.S. has provided more than $66 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since Russia launched a full scale invasion of the country in 2022. In recent months, Trump and Congressional Republicans have balked at sending more U.S. assistance to the country, pressuring Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for a ceasefire agreement. But Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have overplayed his hand by continuing to launch fatal strikes into Kyiv during the talks, frustrating Trump and exposing how little influence he has with the Russian leader.
While the agreement does not offer Ukraine the security guarantees it had long sought, it does, in effect, give Trump and his allies a tangible, economic rationale for maintaining U.S. aid. For long-time Ukraine-backers in the Capitol, the deal revives the prospect of Congress appropriating more funds to Ukraine as early as this year. “This puts American skin in the game,” Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma tells TIME. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa calls the agreement a “huge breakthrough” that allows Trump “to say to the American people that the Ukrainians will pay us back, and we can continue providing the military aid to defend something we are really invested in.”
The joint U.S.-Ukraine investment fund will be administered by both countries and financed through revenues from future energy and mineral projects, including those tied to Ukraine’s vast reserves of lithium, titanium, and rare earth elements, according to a Trump administration official. Existing operations will remain fully under Ukrainian control, and ownership of all resources will remain with Ukraine. But going forward, Kyiv would be required to match any new U.S. military assistance with a resource-based contribution to the fund.
Zelensky’s leadership team was buoyant about the terms. “This is excellent news—we’re feeling optimistic,” says a foreign policy advisor to Zelensky who was involved in the negotiations. Ukrainian negotiators were able to “take out all the really onerous stuff” proposed by the U.S., the adviser says, leaving a deal in which the costs to Ukraine “look minimal.”
While the deal lacks an explicit promise the U.S. will protect Ukraine from more Russian incursions, giving the U.S. a financial stake in the country’s future may be the next best thing. “This is probably as close as we’re going to get to security guarantees with this administration,” the advisor tells TIME.
A former senior Ukrainian official had a more measured reaction, noting that the agreement doesn’t change much on the battlefield. “It’s hard to call this a security guarantee. The Americans can tell the Russians not to attack any projects with US investment. But that does not give security to the rest of the country,” the former official says.
The reaction from Democrats was also mixed, with some warning that the deal risks turning U.S. foreign policy into a pay-to-play operation. For lawmakers who had long supported Ukraine based on shared democratic values and geopolitical interests, the shift to an explicitly transactional arrangement was jarring.
“My worry is that Trump will succumb to the bully Putin,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tells TIME. “He’s doing these elaborate dances, but the proof of the pudding will be if he stands up to Putin, if he stands up for Zelensky, when they’re going to sign a real agreement.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who recently introduced a bipartisan bill that would impose new sanctions and tariffs on nations buying Russian energy, describes the mineral deal as “a positive step” but “largely symbolic.” “It’s meaningless in the immediate practical terms,” he tells TIME. “But it could be a stepping stone toward Trump reaffirming our support for Ukraine in military as well as economic terms.”
Senator Chris Murphy, another Connecticut Democrat, was even more critical, dismissing the deal as pointless since “Donald Trump is rooting for the destruction of Ukraine.” He pointed to reports that Ukraine’s most resource-rich regions are in areas Trump officials have encouraged Ukraine to give up as part of a ceasefire.
“My sense is that [the deal] likely has no teeth in it, and it likely has to do with mineral deposits that are in the Russian-controlled territories that Donald Trump has already said will remain permanently in Russia’s hands,” Murphy tells TIME.
Lawmakers and analysts in Ukraine and America on Thursday were still poring over the details of the deal, particularly the mechanics of the joint U.S.-Ukraine investment fund. Even though accessing the country’s minerals is years off, the way the fund is structured may provide Ukraine with immediate help in its war effort, says Mark Montgomery, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
For Ukraine to continue to fend off the Russian advance, the Ukraine military needs the U.S. to continue to provide real-time intelligence, specialized missiles for Ukrainian fighter jets, and missiles for Patriot batteries that are defending Ukrainian civilians. In recent months, Trump and other Republicans were threatening to cut off all of that.
Over the long term, if this arrangement actually leads to the extraction of valuable minerals, it will “more deeply integrate the United States into the future of Ukraine,” says Montgomery. That shared interest is what Ukraine’s leaders–and Republican hawks–have been pitching to Trump for months, and this deal may have established the right way to get his attention—with dollars and cents.
—With reporting by Simon Shuster